Scathing assessment of how things stand.
25 Likes
I’m honestly not surprised at all. As far as I can tell, viewership is at 1/3 of what it was in 2019.
Some people argued with me when I said it back when, but a large portion of people who watched OWL were only doing it for the Twitch emotes, tokens, skins, and what not. They really didn’t care about the “E Sport” aspect of it, nor did they really care about the teams.
I knew as soon as they moved it off of Twitch, they were sealing their eventual decline.
The only thing that sucks here is that I know they’ll blame it on Covid (despite more people being home and able to watch >.>) instead of their poor decision to move platforms.
48 Likes
As someone who entered OW because of esports, I railed on the OWL business model for how much it was a disaster months before it launched for exactly this stuff and yeah at this point I just can’t get myself to care anymore.
4 Likes
Karma for rushing it out when not a single person was invested enough in the game to want it as an e-sport.
3 Likes
It was actually enough.
But building a league built on investor FOMO bubble for the purpose of selling team colors and branding to hordes of sheeple was doomed from the start.
7 Likes
It’s because they keep ruining the game to make OWL better, so players hate the league and want it to die.
27 Likes
Well they were also wanting to do live arena events, which they can’t do now, and that would’ve directly and indirectly increased viewership for sure.
3 Likes
I’m not surprised with the amount of pros leaving and the absurd censorship they place over the players, fining for the smallest things.
And with the drama that happened over the years, OWL is just unhealthy for OW at this point.
4 Likes
Right, but the player base IS the audience. No one who isn’t playing is going to watch it, so burning the player base BECAUSE of OWL is like, the worst idea ever.
They need to go public with their balancing strategy, which means they NEED a balancing strategy.
20 Likes
Yeah.
I mean, they keep dumpstering heroes to get them out of OWL. But people like heroes, and every time you dumpster one you chase those players out of the game, at least some of them. Ruining Sigma and Orisa dumped a bunch of players, I guarantee it, and they won’t all come back when they’re fixed.
18 Likes
Right, and what they won’t be doing is watching the same league which is why they were dumpster-ed.
They are gone, AND their chance of being viewers is ALSO gone.
1 Like
Yeah, I mean, I started largely neutral toward OWL but after they trashed so many heroes I enjoy I’m pretty bitter and hostile to the league.
13 Likes
I am the same to be honest.
2 Likes
I mean, if we’re being honest here, not a lot of people watch a game for the gameplay, they watch for the personalities, good or bad.
OWL doesn’t have that aspect of things going for it, and so some streamers might even perform better than the league as a whole. Watching any game, professional or otherwise, within a serious context is objectively boring. Watching a game where a personality is able to be themselves though? Gold, absolute gold.
If they wanna improve the league, they need more player-based antics, and less peanut gallery rambling from the casters. Also just delete the chat section entirely. My god… why is this community so cringe in the chat?
7 Likes
We all saw that coming from a mile away
3 Likes
For whatever reason OWL seems like an excuse to not take care of the game for them. Its rather strange.
What exact changes screwed us over strictly because of OWL (as opposed to, say, how the game works when actually being played well, rather than reverting to defeatism, blame-tossing, biases, and the like)?
2 Likes
No, everything is fine… that guy is lying. Blizzard would not fail at something.
This was the inevitable danger of inflating core numbers through promotions, exclusive skins, twitch/battle.net gimmicks.
Eventually those inflated numbers evaporate, and you are not only “the guys who couldn’t accurately forecast” but instead into “The guys who lied about their forecasts”.
Inaccuracy is a lot easier to overcome than deception, especially when investment capital is on the table. I wouldn’t be surprised to see legal action out of this.
4 Likes
It’s even more than that. Most dedicated OW entertainers are still on twitch – people like to link that kind of stuff. Blizzard biffed this one hard. They were not even close to a position to be able to move to a new platform and have people follow them.
1 Like